In a finding that many have subliminally known about for years, but never been actually proven, yet is still quite shocking, the WSJ is reporting that tourism portal Orbitz "has found that people who use Apple Inc.'s Mac computers spend as much as 30% more a night on hotels, so the online travel agency is starting to show them different, and sometimes costlier, travel options than Windows visitors see." Which is not really surprising: after all Mac users tend to "see" far pricier computers too, not to mention "buy." As a result, Orbitz has decided to automatically redirect Mac users: aka the rich, but gullible ones, to seeing hotel offers that are more expensive than those seen by PC users by on average $20-$30. Call it OS screening, and call it perfectly acceptable: because it appears, empirically, that Mac users are perfectly ok with spending more than they have to for virtually anything.

Orbitz executives confirmed that the company is experimenting with showing different hotel offers to Mac and PC visitors, but said the company isn't showing the same room to different users at different prices. They also pointed out that users can opt to rank results by price.

Orbitz found Mac users on average spend $20 to $30 more a night on hotels than their PC counterparts, a significant margin given the site's average nightly hotel booking is around $100, chief scientist Wai Gen Yee said. Mac users are 40% more likely to book a four- or five-star hotel than PC users, Mr. Yee said, and when Mac and PC users book the same hotel, Mac users tend to stay in more expensive rooms.

"We had the intuition, and we were able to confirm it based on the data," Orbitz Chief Technology Officer Roger Liew said.

The effort underscores how retailers are becoming bigger users of so-called predictive analytics, crunching reams of data to guess the future shopping habits of customers. The goal is to tailor offerings to people believed to have the highest "lifetime value" to the retailer.

Orbitz first confirmed Mac users' preferences in October and began working them into the complicated mix of factors that determine its search results. The effect isn't always obvious. In tests performed by The Wall Street Journal, search results for hotels in cities including Las Vegas, Orlando, Philadelphia and Boston were the same for both Macs and PCs. A New York search turned up more expensive hotels for Mac users, but only after the first 20 listed.

So far this type of order prejudice appears to have only impacted Orbitz.

Rival travel sites Expedia Inc., Priceline.com Inc. and Travelocity, which is a unit of Sabre Holdings Corp., don't use a person's computer operating system when suggesting hotels, spokesmen said. Apple declined to comment.

Of course, now that Orbitz' "platform targetting" has been exposed, the company can say goodbye to its Mac user base. However, this will hardly be the last time that the "aspiration" consumer segment known as the Macerati is targeted:

Apple users already stand out as big spenders. Nearly half of retailers in a recent study by Forrester Research and Shop.org said users of tablets—a large majority of which are iPads—tend to place bigger online orders than users of laptops or desktops. Shoppers on Apple devices like iPhones also outspend shoppers using Android or BlackBerry devices, accounting for half of all mobile purchases, according to International Business Machines, which tracks data from retailers.

Fashion site Rue La La pays close attention to iPhone and iPad users, who account for 75% of all of its mobile orders, said CEO Ben Fischman.

Which of course means one last thing: soon some journalist will discover that credit card companies targeted Mac users almost exclusively, and that the average Apple buyer is either to their neck in student loans (federally funded of course), or has $25,000 more in credit card debt than the guy next door running PC... and $50,000 more than the guy around the block still slaving under (a far more nimble version of) Linux.

Step aside class, gender and religion wars: here come the OS wars, or who can outspend everyone else, still have the "coolest gadgets", and merely live month to month.

But hey: if one must impress people one doesn't like, and whose operating systems one has no idea how to use, with stuff that makes one spend more money by default, so be it. One doesn't become an aspirational upper-class poseur by not having a Retina screen.

Sorry, I am very conservative and have been a UNIX and LINUX user for years. Using MAC on the front end of the business ever since they gave us (anyone with real computer skills) access via the underlying UNIX platform. I still use LINUX servers for all our data/financials but I manage these closely and only a couple IPs have direct access to these secure servers, but the damn "point and click" generation likes to do just that. Thinking, not so much...

I charge everything I buy, and I mean everything to my Starwood Preffered Guest AMEX and rack up enough points for 2 free weeks at the Kaanapali Westin every year. Oil changes, gas, groceries, clothes, everything. And pay it off in full every month.

Agreed - Starwood Preferred has been the hot CC for the past couple of years...but, the hell w/ the Kaanapal...the upgrades for Starwood Platinums in Asia makes Hawaiian SPG upgrades look like a crap in your hand (I lived many years in Hawaii).

Regardless of whether you are in favor of PC or Mac, the fact that a company such as Orshitz would stoop to such lows and prey upon its own customers deserves a visit from Anonymous. Let's see how much they can charge their ex-customers when their site is down.

Perhaps preying is too strong a word but they are gauging customers by not providing the best price available while telling their customers that it's the best price available. Perhaps fraud is a better word.

Given that my generation has no brains and are just a bunch of iDummies waiting to spend our last dollar for some crap, er, app, perhaps at least we can spell. Unless you meant praying for us? I doubt by the context it was a fat finger; or maybe it was, but when insulting people for being stupid, use the right word: preying. Oh yeah spell check doesn't detect context. Maybe some Mac user will make an app for that. That would be ironic.

They show you the "preferred" matches first. If you're dumb enough to buy that, so sorry. You can click "lowest price" sort and see what the other choices are. You can also cross check with the hotel web sites and other travel sites... it's called shopping around -- and non dummies, non lazies do that regularly.

You've completely missed the point. Even without trying to get them to spend more, Mac users actively seek out more expensive options when booking. So Orbitz figured this out and is now going to present Mac users with the more expensive choices they wanted in the first place. Not exactly evil. If a customer drove up to an auto dealer in a BMW, what would a salesperson assume they were interested in looking at, a luxury vehicle or a sub-compact? It's not Orbitz that is stupid or evil, it's paying all that money for a high end Mac when 99.9% of the population could get by on a low end PC.

Linux is King. I nearly scream when i start fixing peoples Windows machines on average i fix about 6 X windows 7 machines a year and this is just friends and familly. If they are clued up I put a linux partition on their machine with a shared folder for placing/sharing all their downloads etc The problems are usually virus related or just too damn slow. Often the biggest problems are the various type of anti virus people use and pop up adds screaming at you from every bit of software you ever add to the laptop. Apple pay thousands of developers to prevent you getting full access to the full array of file types your machine can use. Case in point Calibre(open source book reader) uses all ebook types epub, mobi and pdf etc and does all the conversions.. the only complete ebook solution. Apple users are people that love being seperated from their money even my 11 year old daughter just laughs at Apple users with her android phone(linux kernal) with 500 of the best childrens books ever written.

I often think that the financial world could learn so much from the principles of the open source community. Without disrespect I have to agree with the words of the real hero Richard Stallman when commenting on the achievement of Steve Jobs was the marketing ability to "Make a Jail look cool"

I have been running Ubuntu linux on a partitioned pc with a dual operating system for several years and have never had any headaches that PC users mention. I have gotten so use to it that I rarely ever use the Windows portion. Maybe once every couple of months.The last time was to log on so I could walk someone on the phone through a process, (who needed to remove a virus) and I wanted to describe to them how to do it.

I gave my Grandaughter (who grew up using a PC) an Everex Notebook running linux when she was ten or eleven. Without any instruction from me she figured out how to use and install all the software and to tweak it in ways that I didin't even know about. It can't be too difficult if she figured it all out on her own.

I grew up with UNIX. But... I don't have the time to be running around looking for apps and assorted bits and pieces for Linux: I do, however, have it (Ubuntu) as a second partition on my home computer; I installed it years ago with the intention of switching away from MS totally- got sidetracked (lack of some key apps), and never made the cut-over.

At a minimum people should have a copy of Knoppix (may be other variants out there, I've lost touch a bit). You can boot it off a CD. Very handy when Windows craps and you need to reach in and get important files: I've never tried to boot Knoppix off of an Apple machine, so no idea (but seems most probable). There's other cool stuff about it as well, but for most this would be the biggie.

Like you, I also end up bailing people out (though as the years pass I'm more out of the loop because I've been far removed from computing for quite some time). As for myself, I've never had any problem in over six years with my XP machine (which I built): and I don't really spend any time messing with it (knock on wood/head).

I do everything from babysitting and dishwashing to designing circuit boards to programming high-performance clusters, so yep, I do write code for a living, directly or indirectly. The only good idea Apple had was about the dock, and that had already been popularized as an addition to the Linux OS as early as 05 if I remember correctly.

Mac OS is based on BSD (with closed and open source components), and Unix (of which BSD is a variant) wasn't homemade - it was made at Bell Labs by AT&T. Linux is the, arguably, "personal" variant of the kernel.

Ding, ding! We have a winner! (though Linux is not based on BSD, but FreeBSD is; this all gets nitpicky,)

My first exposure to UNIX was earlier BSD running on Digital Equipment machines, rather rough back then (especially running as corporate production machines, which is really the only place outside of the academic environment that it existed). This will really date me, but, I once used a Sun Microsystems workstation whose serial number was 100.

How much time did you spend to get that effect, how much time to you spend maintaining your computer, and how much is your time worth to you?

If you could do this in a few minutes, with no need for maintenence, congratulations. If you spent days or weeks configuring your machine, but consider your time to be worthless, then also congratulations. If you spent and continue to spend a great amount of time on it, and consider your time valuable, then I hope you value your smugness highly.

Ahh, ubuntu is very use-friendly unlike some other distribs. Except for finding drivers, which could be a headache to find, it is very easy to install. I like knoppix though - mostly using it from USB stick. I don't get Mac OS look and feel, which I don't give a damn about, but I get quite agile and stable OS. Rest is BS, every OS has its pros and cons, no need to worship any of them.

This type of profiling and price changing is done widepread across the net.

When I book my airline tickets online there are some weird price changes from one minute to the other on the same flight. changes in price can be justified by the online booking system but not to that extent.

My vacation this year was riding bikes with my son to the nearest state park (about 17 miles each way), avoiding the new fees becasue we were on bikes, taking a nap in the shade, riding back, and stopping at the Mexican supermarket for tacos and Jaritos.

Fuck that.I took my son on a drug and alcohol fueled binge starting in NYC and terminating in Las Vegas about 4 weeks later that was shrouded in extended blackouts, pissing in our pants, being thrown out of super high end stays, tossing our salad out windows, setting several hotel rooms on fire, probably insulting and offending lots of nice people, setting up porn subscriptions to the homes of people that'd pissed us off and lots of other fun things. I've raised him to be self sufficient. He even has his own bail bond card!

Actually, we just stayed home and golfed for a week.Hell, I don't even drink or smoke.We told lots of jokes and cooked some really great meals.

Oh and BTW, with that ORBITZ crap, that's discriminatory as all hell and probably in violation of numerous laws violating privacy, segmentation of market and even possibly some anti trust statutes.

Let's have the boys in DC do something about it!Call some hearings, start investigations, collect some more campaign contributions while the wrong shit that's making America Great continues unabated.

Skateboarder loves beers and smokes pot, as every skateboarder should. He would take his son on an alcoholic, pot-fueled skate trip when the son turned 18. What better way to learn from dad, that beer and skateboarding do not go together...

One year I bought a POS sailboat and drifted down the
East coast reading,drinking and fishing. ( should of brought a metal detector. ) I "fixed" the boat as I went and sold it for double, which wasn't much. I didn't spend $100/wk. Lost a loght of weight and felt way better mentally.
I got a call years later from a Sheriff's department that the boat was abandoned. Kind of felt bad for it because I had a lot of minor adventures and it never let me down.
Next time way more books!

your first comment is spot on. We vacation a couple times a year. Always a couple weeks in Deer Valley. $1,200 a night is a no brainer and a great deal in my book. Worry free and includes the best ski gear, which is good since the damn airlines want your first born to travel with any outdoor gear.

I upped you because it is a good system that makes the sheeple happy, but, Mac users embrace an "idiot proof" system that works great but requires little intelligence...same as watching reality TV...flame on you Mac fan boys..but, I have been programming since 1973 & know more about computers than you do...& also their clients.

No, you know more about PROGRAMMING than he does. I would bet a silver dollar that he knows more than you about USING computers. Do mechanics look down on people who don't change their own oil (presumably because they have better things to do)? Probably, but those people tend to be more successful than those same mechanics.

No, I doubt anyone on this site knows more about USING computers that I do - I hacked before anyone knew what that even was - going back 30 - 40 years - I made MILLIONS of dollars because I could make the early internet business connections that the inept Fortune 500's were just drooling to make.

I retired in my early 40's...& I owe most of it to my computer expertise - & So we are clear Mr. Mosley - Fuck Macs - Fuck that idiot consumer fanboy culture - save your fucking money & buy something that has 2X the power @ 1/2 the price.

Hacking is programming. You don't know shit about using them. You shouldn't have to know much of anything to be able to use a computer to increase your productivity. You have the classic programmer's mentality that a man should adapt to his tools, rather than the other way around.

lol, you made millions in the internet bubble. Big deal. Might as well brag about the great houses you flipped during the housing bubble and claim that you know what people like in a house.

Always funny to see the mac fanboys profess their superior system - which is still designed primarily for a 1 button mouse (worse design choice EVAR).

Regarding your critique of the previous poster, hacking is but one type of programming, but from what he was describing, he did quite a bit more than that. And frankly, making millions during the bubble was easy for the bankster and CEO pukes pumping and backdating stocks, but has never been easy for honest, hard-working people. The people who actually MAKE stuff are practically never so well paid.

Anyhow, Mac users should realize that a system designed for the lowest common denominator is basically very dumbed down and limiting for a power user. Mac 'simplicity' is much like tweets for a philosopher: if your aspirations are low, then tweet away, but your pride is very much misplaced.

Beyond all that though is the question of how poorly Apple treats its users - like how 2 yrs ago they tried to take a HUGE cut (10%?) out of every content purchase made on their platform. As they say, there's a sucker born every minute, and Apple is great at flattering the egos of their victims.

lol, you are criticizing the egos of others, while claiming to be some sort of philosopher.

What the fuck do you think a computer is for, exactly? What EXACTLY can a PC do that a Mac can't , other than get infected over and over by every form of malware in existance and suck away at the users time? Games don't count--we are talking about a tool for productivity, not masturbation.

I have used every major OS out there, and did so for at least one year each. I chose Mac because it doesn't waste my time. If you want to waste your time struggling with a product that attaches everything to everything else, such that if one thing breaks, everything breaks (and then loads it with bloatware), then by all means choose yourself a nice, cheap PC. Just don't ask yourself why my all Mac lab--yes, laboratory, doing scientific things, not just email and word processing(our HPLC is run by a 15 year old Mac that has been on continuously without a problem for the last five years straight)--requires literally ZERO IT support while the rest of my department requires so much that they have three full time IT staffers.

As it happens, I have painstakingly (and happily) read many dozens of real philosophy books (ie: not BS like Ayn Rand, but rather Nietzsche, Foucault, etc.), so I'd say I know something about philosophy, but frankly one shouldn't need all that much education to understand the difference between philosophical texts (where a sentence can easily be half a page long and ideas are so complex that they take hundreds of pages to elaborate) and a tweet. In any case, making that comparison didn't imply anything about myself being a philosopher, hence I think your criticism is invalid.

As far as power-user software that does not exist on Mac, as a high level programmer I can tell you that Mac has nothing like Visual Studio + Resharper, which together let you refactor and navigate code LIKE A BAWS. UI-layer-wise, Mac has NOTHING like .net and WPF. Want the very best power tools for database management (ie: stuff light years beyond the crappy web-based UI that comes with Oracle)? Good luck finding it on Mac. (and I could go on and on with more examples)

Are you OK being limited to less than 10% of the software that is available on PC (or on Linux as open source, nearly)? Sure, sooner or later the most critical and popular stuff will get replicated to Mac, but the opportunity costs of waiting are significant. Evidently, you don't spend much time looking for innovative software, or you would likely be bothered by the lack of Mac software (and I'm not talking games).

I studied biochemistry originally and worked in a number of research labs, so I know something of the software scientists mostly use: Excel and Word. So you used spreadsheets on 3 different OS's - does that make you feel LIKE A BAWS? And frankly, you truly are a hard-core neophyte if you think you can master anything in a year.

I build my own PC's and never have trouble with stuff breaking down (I pick good components, unlike Dell), and you obviously don't know much about PC architecture if you don't see how modular it is and claim that "if one thing breaks, everything breaks" - that's only 'till you replace the broken component, just like a Mac... Oh, and for a POWER USER, having a near infinite number of configurations for your hardware is a huge plus, whereas for a NOOB it's overwhelming.

Anyhow, don't expect another reply from me: arguing with Mac fanboys is pointless. Enjoy planning your more expensive trips on your more expensive, more limited platform!

You are a child. I don't have time to write my own programs like I don't have time to design and build my own cars. I choose a car that is low maintenence and works every time I need it, that doesn't have fundamental design flaws like exploding when the bumper is tapped from behind.

All the software on PC is jammed together in the worst method imaginable. Installing something new is like playing Russian Roulette, in that it might overwrite some file that some other program needs. X breaks Y is COMMON on PC. But PC must be superior because you can program on it, and anyone who uses any other platform is a newb, no matter what they use it for.

You want people who use computers for simple productivity reasons to struggle with your shitty platform because you are a sad, bitter person :(

You are all idiots, I too am a software engineer that has a Mac but runs arch-linux on my vm and have contributed code to OpenBSD many moons ago.

Macs are unparalleled, even Linus uses a macbook air. All this talk about performance and programs is ridiculous, 80% of you use your computer for internet surfing and the occasional word document exclusively.

You are all idiots, I too am a software engineer that has a Mac but runs arch-linux on my vm and have contributed code to OpenBSD many moons ago.

Macs are unparalleled, even Linus uses a macbook air. All this talk about performance and programs is ridiculous, 80% of you use your computer for internet surfing and the occasional word document exclusively.

I've got a Windoze XP machine that has given me no problems since I built it some six years ago. It's running ALL the time (running a VOIP app, my only phone). My wife can tell you how little I like to mess with computers: I can be heard cussing about our shitty Internet connection from time to time- living in the rural hinterlands, our options here are pretty poor; this is NOT an OS issue.

Was going to convert over to Linux (Ubuntu - wanted to extract myself from all corporate computing stuff) about five years ago but found that I didn't want to spend the time doing so: had legacy apps that weren't readily available under Ubuntu, or were really involved in order to get to work. And now days I would rather spend money on tractor implements than new bright and shiny computing stuff. Yup, my old shit gets the job done, and with minimal effort and cost.

we ran on XP for years at my business because it was the only stable platform.. when i say Microshite was "stable" that's relative, to garbage ..it still had to be rebooted 3 times a day

then there's my 20 year long personal experience of Microshite PC's an laptops... when i say "experience" that's another relative term to the garbage Gates & Bulmer shit out.. i'd call it torture

Gates & Bulmer have been masterful in monopolising retail channels and squeezing out or buying all competition so as the truly dumbed.down consumer can't see anything else and don't know any better (like the cool smooth uber-reliable Apple)

these monopolists are like Govt with the roads, you get used to llving with incompetent shit so long you can't see out the box, it's the way it's always been

i think the words getting around, Apple could be on the cusp of a wave to takeover laptops and PC's ...Microshite are a toxic brand with a ticking time-bomb under their garbage software.. sooner consumers are shown the light the better for the whole planet

Gates & Bulmer should be shot in the nose (after being tarred and feathered of course) for over 2 decades of commercial corruption and the greatest dis-service to taking humanity forward in technology ..we could have a mass execution with all the moronic incompetent Govt traffic planners around the globe

Exactly. I can't remember how many issues I had with PCs over the years, how many crashes, how much lost data, photos, hardware replacements, tech issues, etc., etc., etc.

Over six years using MacBooks and not one crash, not one freeze, not one problem. Not one. The odd Option/Command/Esc has been the worst of it. Worth the price of admission, not to mention ease of usability, despite what anyone has to say in dirision.

I'd rather not use Orbitz than own a PC again, other than a cheap, expendable netbook for adventure traveling, that's for damn sure.

well i have one complaint. the jack from my headphones broke and stuck in the back of the imac. the whole motherboard (or something -- don't quote me and see above) had to be replaced for $800. still, i do like it and did buy another for my granddaughter. don't use headphones anymore though.

i also liked the comment above about not having to adapt to one's tools. p.s. will google ever understand grammar or will it always just find word matches? and not even able to indicate clearly the matches in the retrieved data. and this is worth what capitalization?

no amount of garbage articles from ZH (from Reggie or others) can take away the decades of suffering at the hands of peddlers of shit, Gates & Bulmer

and no amount of spitting their dummies outta the pram can take away the immediate and tremendous (customer) satisfaction the day you buy your Apple... and the smugness just builds year after faultless year

Apple is pretty amazing, up there with the very best brands like BMW, Caterpillar and JCB

Garbage is garbage.

Class is class.

No amount of lightweights blowing hot air out their arses (ie. propaganda) can change the truth

You're right, you just had "very, very bad luck with PC's", infact if all them Dells and HP's crashed every time you turned them on, then its just insane bad luck. Im left with the feeling when i listen to MAC users, that i have been incredibly lucky over the years never to have had any problems with my PC's. Im blessed i suppose. (and its not as if MACs don’t crash as well.. i have seen many die, it just depends what they are being used for)

When we go back to the early 90's i had lots of problems with PC's, but that’s only because the code was shit, i was ripping them apart, tinkering, re-assembling, and generally walking blindly through the valley of computer death. But back then MACs were useless, other than for using Adobe and Protools(i used to own one, stable, but when you left it on for a day or two, not so stable). For the record, i cant remember a time in the last ten years i have had a major problem with a leading brand PC. I think i have had 3 in that time. Currently running one now.

It maybe just a coincidence, but most MAC users i know are practically computer illiterate, gullible to gimmicks, and definitely would pay more for stuff without asking questions . Just an observation.

I believe the reason Macs don't get viruses at the rate of PCs is because of the sheer number of PCs v. Macs. Macs only really became popular in the mid-2000s so trust me they are just as susceptible to viruses. They don't have some super immune system it's just no one has made them--yet. And when the viruses come good luck fixing your mac. Oh yeah you won't be able to. Once the viruses hit macs Apple's stock will plummet so get ready for some fun caus it wont be too far off before this happens. Especially since the level of Mac-hatred is rising and that is a post 2010 phenomenon. Macs look great, I admit. They look cool. They are easy to carry. It's all style. But once its breaks its broke. You can fix a PC. And you can download all sorts of software which isn't true for Macs. I just don't get it. macs are for people who like style but aren't looking for much computing power. That it.

Exactly, its just a numbers game, more people use windows and more hackers use it too. Its the same scenario with Google Chrome, they claim to be 80% safer than IE, when really, IE is just more popular and more hackers try to work with it. Give it time, when people start chipping away at the code the flaws will show up. Otherwise the assumption is that Google programmers are smarter than Microsoft programmers, which is just gibberish.

Right, i'll take your word for it. I do have to take into consideration the workload of Microsoft programmers though, perhaps its also the corporation structure and management that holds them back. But claiming that Google programmers are smarter is just silly.

Incorrect. Mac comes with ports disabled by default, meaning there is no way in without the user knowing what he is doing. PC comes with numerous random services set to "on" for no reason. Further, Mac runs almost everything in a sandbox, so one program doesn't have access to everything. A Mac needs to be rooted to be compromised. A PC needs to look at a picture on the internet. Just plugging in an infected flash drive will allow code to be executed, which is fucking nuts.

Not sure how you think you can fix a virus infected PC, except maybe by wiping your hard drive and reinstalling Windows. Can't really say how I would fix a virus infected Mac, since there has never been a case of one ever (the claim that they don't have the market share is BS, anything that claims to be immune to viruses paints a big crosshair on itself). There have been trojans, but smart people can avoid those without much hassle or impediment. Viruses can come from ANYWHERE.

You must be lucky, 100% of Macbook Pros from 5 years ago shiped with faulty Nvidia graphics chips Apple forced them to supply to get the laptop out on time. The hard drives failed quickly due to the excess heat, and there were many other issues. I haven't actually met an owner of a Macbook Pro that didn't have problems, ones Apple refused to aknowledge.

Still most owners of the faulty machines refused to blame Apple and just dealth with the second degree burns. Kind of like wearing a crown of thorns to pledge your allegiance to the kingdom of Jobs.

No offense but you sound like a liar. Well I guess saying that is offensive. You are listening to WABC, a NYC radio station, and own a car in that city and built a house there? In NYC? Something smells funny and it sint your testes being fried by your Macbook. Hey at least they wont be able to proceate. i always look at the brightside.

No offense but you sound like a liar. Well I guess saying that is offensive. You are listening to WABC, a NYC radio station, and own a car in that city and built a house there? In NYC? Something smells funny and it ain't your testes being fried by your Macbook. Hey at least they wont be able to procreate. i always look at the brightside. Maybe I'm wrong and if I am I apologize.

Sounds like you finally figured out how not to treat your computer like shit.

I knew a guy several years backed that swore his PC was piece of shit. I rec. someone to him to check it out. Well the guy I rec. said to me later...no shit his CPU was running like shit, he had all this fuckin' porn on there and because of the porn he got viruses.

Just sayin' sometimes it's not the hardware, sometimes it's the person using it.

I wouldn't count on OSX as being virus-proof. The more people that invest in iGadgets, the more the virus writers are rubbing their hands together with glee. They've already got viruses written, and there are very few OSX anti-viral programs out there.

This message was typed on a 5 year old laptop PC that survived a fall down a flight of stairs with absolutely no problems as a result.

The majority of problems are due to the "value add" crap that Dell, HP and Gateway would dump on PCs. I've had ZERO issues with an XP machine that I built myself, not a SINGLE problem in over six years: well, I did recently reapply thermal grease for the CPU (was getting a bit noisy), but this wasn't an OS issue.

I'm NOT biased toward MS. Actually, I grew up with UNIX, and I learned to hate MS! And as mentioned previously, I'd love to switch over to LINUX (I'm too poor to switch to Apple; and, frankly, the entire idea of switching is based on extricating myself from any reliance on coporate entities), but just am too busy with other things (which are of higher priority) to do so.

In the entire scheme of things, yes, I think that APPL is worth less. What was that Richard Stallman quote? “Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.”

Once upon a time people walking down the street hollering and gesturing to themselves were identified as being crazy. Today, in this iCrap this iCrap that world, we have MANY people doing it and we no longer refer to such actions as being crazy. Seems like both cases are found to be reacting to "voices inside their heads," both cases distracted from the here and now of the physical world. Given this perspective I would have to ask whether APPL isn't a NET LOSS to humanity. I suppose if you're talking about the world of fiat then, yes, APPL is worth LOTS!

I would venture a guess that many Apple buyers spend more time considering which color they want it in than they do about any performance specifications or benchmarks.

And what is this "value" that you speak of? I paid $300 for a small netbook, paid nothing for Ubuntu linux, and I see very little reason to spend several thousand dollars so I can have an illuminated apple on the cover. I'm curious what value you see in Apple stuff that I'm not seeing. To me, it looks like garden-variety brand differentiation, and I really do have to hand it to Apple in their ability to create the kind of cultish following they've managed to achieve.

P.S. I should add that I went to one of the first schools to require computers, and yes, they were Apples. Mac SE in particular. The thing crashed all the time, it was outrageously expensive, and there was almost no engineering/scientific software available at the time. They made a deal with the school to offer a miniscule discount, probably in hopes that like the Tobacco companies, that if they get 'em while they're young, they can have a customer for life. It didn't turn out that way, and most every engineer or scientist I know uses either PC or unix/linux today.

It was the artistic crowd that really fell in love with the Macs. I think the reason for this is that because Apple was the first to develop a graphical user interface, so it's fairly obvious why artistic types would gravitate towards Apple.

"most every engineer or scientist I know uses either PC or unix/linux today. It was the artistic crowd that really fell in love with the Macs."

I'm pretty certain that facts/reality backs this up. Having served in the corporate manufacturing world I can attest to the fact that it was PCs and Linux boxes that engineers used to manage and write code for the automation of PC and Linux boxes that ran factory equipment. And the marketing and tech writers tended towards Apple products: Apples had their chance to make greater inroads.

Yes, they did have their chance. But in the end, all they really had was a proprietary graphical user interface, which in the early days (not sure about now) was actually implemented in ROM, so it was literally not subject to change.

Nowadays, I can do absolutely everything a Mac/Apple can do, using a very nice graphical interface, for 1/10 the cost. Oh, and the software is free, if not bug-free. I've helped on a few open-source projects, and I believe that all these proprietary OSs and software are going to be relegated to the dustbin of history. Very soon.

"I wish ZH would stop posting these articles that we can not relate to, asshole."

There, no more dangling participle.

Posted from a bullet proof think pad that I also use to drive nails and jack my car. Had one of those white Mac G3 and the damn thing was always hot to touch. Mother board crapped out 2 years and one week after purchase. The guarantee was for two years. I spit on your grave, Jobs.

Apple is for sum dum fuks who figure out only too late thay can't do this and can't do that. You can't do work on the effing thing unless you buy microsoft compatible this and still get effed trying to do drafting or interfaces with people who actually work for a living. But you can look cool eyeing porn at the starbucks over a $4 cup of joe. hahahahahaha!!

Well duh... Within the general population Mac users are probably younger, singler, trendier, gayer, more "spiritual" and generally in possession of a greater amount of disposable income+willingness to part with it.

When that reservation via Mac shows up in the form of a young couple with a single kid in a Prius....time to brush off the deed to that bridge....

For a brief moment in time it was probably worth it to turn on the extra customer service charm if someone dialed in on a cell phone too.

Now there is your classic "butthurt PC user" reveling in selection bias. He chose to use a PC, and it sucks ass, but because he chose it, it must have been the best choice.

I drive a beat up 19 year old pickup, but I have no fewer than 4 Macs in my home, and my lab is exclusively Mac, save for one guy who insisted on a PC. It has had 10 times the problems of all the others put together (which, among ten computers over 6 years has been one faulty hard drive).

No, I think the Mac is probably superior all the way around to the PC (although it took them long enough to suck it up and make a two-button mouse) but what I said above probably lines up pretty well with reality too.